Bad Blood: A Memoir

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There is something petulant and mincy about her writing, drudging up the mistakes and misery of others, judging it snidely, and throwing it down. In Sage's celebration - or invention - of the glamorous alter ego beneath her grandfather's desperately limited life, Bad Blood is at its most gripping, and its most moving touch is her tribute to his thwarted ambition and ridiculed desires.

My grandparents were very loving and I was part of the furniture really in a way that children aren't now – now they're central to everything. I think she was still horrified that her life had been nearly derailed, and I think she just liked her life and wanted to live it.There is a sense of the opening up of a century as the war drifts into memory and the opportunities for girls like Sage begin to appear.

One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. I didn't know most of the music that was being referenced but I enjoyed that sense that you could bond with people over it, be a music snob and use your knowledge as a weapon. Bad Blood presents a multi-generational family portrait; Sage scrapes away at the veneers of her family, and reveals what it has been hidden far beneath the surface. Their careers ran in parallel; both graduated with first-class degrees in 1964, both moved on to Birmingham University, where Sage studied at the Shakespeare Institute. It is only in the printed word that Lorna can breathe; even then she feels Grandpa looking over her shoulder as she reads.

Initially, Lorna attended Hanmer Church of England School, and her descriptions of her early education take me straight back: the dreaded multiplication tables; the horrible playground games. But this identity, of married woman, still educating herself and passing her A levels, clearly wouldn’t compute for the authorities sending her the proofs of her success. Without seeming to aim for higher things, Lorna Sage has written an autobiography of true beauty, a stripped down revelation of youth and memory. A week later she died of emphysema, aged only 57, and, although I’d never met her, I felt as if I had. She learnt, too, the importance of being top of the class; intellectual success was a means of keeping moral disapproval at bay.

During the 1970s, she established her reputation as an authoritative reviewer of contemporary fiction.These reflected her growing interest in neo-Platonism, an interest that was to take her to Italy and the archives and galleries of Florence.